Students from the University of Groningen won this year’s international synthetic biology competition for designing a bacterium that senses and signals when meat is rotten.

At this year's International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM)
competition, a team of students from the University of Groningen won the
grand prize for engineering the bacterium Bacillus subtilis to detect rotten
meat.

The team was one of 72 student groups that gathered at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) during November 2-5 to compete in the 2012
iGEM World Championship. The event was the final venue for the synthetic
biology students from Asian, European, and American universities to showcase
their designs for simple biological systems made from standard,
interchangeable DNA parts.

Team Groningen celebrates their win at the iGEM 2012 World Championships. Image courtesy of: University of Groningen.

"We did not really expect anything when we came to MIT. We did a great job
during the European jamboree, but competing in the U.S. is a whole different
story," said Tom van Lente, a member of the winning team. "When we won the
grand prize, we could not believe it. We just walked up to the stage with
some disbelief and a very big smile upon our faces."

Comprised of 11 students and six faculty advisors, Team Groningen of The
Netherlands engineered a strain of B. subtilis to include a promoter that
regulated the expression of a pigment reporter. This reporter is visible to
the naked eye when the bacterium encounters rotten meat.

"We were thinking that it would be a great idea to make a system that could
detect when meat is spoiled," said van Lente. "This was also an opportunity
to make people think about the amounts of food they throw away."

Currently, we assess food using the “best before” dating system, which leads
us to throw away 1.3 billion tons of food—about a third of global food
production. The bacterial reporter system, called Food Warden, would
indicate when food is safe to eat even when the “best before” date has
passed.

Team Slovenia took second place for their targeted drugs delivery system,
which dispenses multiple drugs at different time intervals. Third prize went
to the team from Paris Bettencourt, which engineered bio-sensing cells that
could self-destruct before any DNA could leak into the environment.

For the first time, the competition also featured an entrepreneurial division.
Like other iGEM competitors, students in the new division worked and
competed over the summer to use synthetic biology for new science. In
addition, they designed startup companies to support their work. The 2012
entrepreneurial grand prize went to the team from the University of Alberta
for its business Upcycled Aromatics. The company uses principles of
synthetic biology to fill the demand for environmentally friendly and
high-value aromatic chemicals.

"Another impressive team was the team from Beijing," said van Lente. The
Beijing team manipulated Escherichia coli with DNA and light so the
bacterium gave off a protein that scientists could use to make
high-resolution pictures.

Despite the temptation to investigate these other projects more closely, van
Lente and his teammates are remain focused on their own project, handling
the publicity it gotten this week.

His team also won the iGEMer's Prize, Best Food & Energy Project, Best Poster,
and shared Best Presentation with University College London. Other iGEM 2012
winners include: